On the Birthday of Martin Luther King: What Have We Learned in the Last 50 Years?

The Universe—or God or Allah, if you prefer—constantly sends us a stream of teachers in the form of people and experience. Among the greatest of those teachers has been Martin Luther King.

We constantly get the opportunity to understand at a deeper level whether the teachers are offering something of value that we might use to improve our lives. The way the game is played, maybe, is one constant reality that we have collectively refused to see: That society and imaginary ego send us a vast array of false teachers. As long as we are paying attention to these teachers, we cannot awaken ourselves. At the same time, some of the greatest teachers from Socrates to King, are demonized by those who control our worldly resources so that we dismiss their messages.

And the way the mind works, we have failed to get the messages of people like King because those like him are labeled by our institutions and misguided people as unrealistic, unpatriotic, divisive or spoken by one who is of the “wrong religion.”

Maybe some of the most spiritually-empowering words ever spoken are in these words King spoke over 50 years ago: